But now, at the last, it was he must sue and I be cold. For, under our altered relations, I had come to recognise, though late, how wrong was this continued communion, however platonic, between us. It was not that I loved my brother less, but that I respected myself more. I had been blinded by all the novelty and glamour. He was pagan at heart, I saw, and I was at heart religious. My thoughts turned with affection to the quiet nunnery at Wellcot. I longed to see my kind again, to recover something of the world I had lost. I had no real faith in his protestations, no real belief that, should it ever chance to him to recover his rights--which, in truth, seemed impossible--he would claim me to my legitimate share in them. And I found no room in my world for a paradise of sinful loves. He sighed much, and was very pathetic, poor fellow, over my changed attitude, and wearied me to death. Then he took to verse, and depressed me more. He had a strange faculty for a sort of big-sounding line, which he would invent and declaim in his odd moments while engaged over mending his snares or sewing buttons on his gaiters. It was quite impressive in its place, but was not exhilarating when applied to _les amours_. “This world” (he declared once) “is but the weed-heap of the spheres, Whereon we rot and fester, torn from the skies, And are consumed in fire, to manure And quicken old fields of heaven with new love. O, sweet! wind with me on the damnéd pile, So of our mingled dust shall blossom heaven”-- A romantic use to put your poor little Diana to, eh, my friend? But, indeed, I would have none of it. I hate that fashion of decrying the flesh, because your poet has a stomachache. My body is the only certain God I know in the midst of these shadows. I cling to it, worshipping it with all the pretty gifts I can think. When it goes, where shall I be? Seeking and crying for it again through space. I will not have it abused to such uses, my sweet body that I love so. Well, it had all vastly interested me once: the fond, comical incongruity; the unexpected soul of my Nimrod revealing itself through suffering. He did not, dear simpleton, in the least understand his own inconsistency: how, loving all birds and beasts, as he professed to do, and so claiming affinity with Nature, he could use and approve the latest engines of civilisation for their slaughter. He called the red deer “the spirit of the antlered tree,” and went to shoot it with a gun. He made me a pretty waistcoat of squirrel skins (I went sweetly befurred, indeed, throughout the cold winters), and dwelt lovingly on the primeval romance of woodlands, meaning, in fact, that rapture of flight and pursuit of visible things which alone appeals to the unredeemed barbarian. In the end, to speak truth, his mad rhapsodies came to remind me, only too uncomfortably, of the dead astrologer; and I looked askance on what seemed a common derivation from a crazy stock.